She tried not to think of the games, but even with her best efforts she had been forced to many times over the past year. The interviews before leaving the Capitol, the Victor’s tour when she was paraded around for the cameras and the districts.
Her games had been short. Nine days that had felt like ninety. Exhaustion that caused your bones to ache, dirt with the smell of rust you couldn’t get out of your fingers, a gnawing hunger in the pit of your stomach. The isolation while the world watched, never allowing you to show weakness.
“Suffocating,” she finally said. She had tried so hard not to feel it during the games, so focused on winning. On living.
“Isolating.” She had been alone, even in the alliance. She had not been able to trust even her partner to protect her back, to guard while she slept. She was his biggest obstacle to getting home- he would have been stupid not to realize that.
“Make him like you.” Charlie would have to- and she could. Lacee had seen her do it time and time again. They would torment some poor classmate together and they would forgive Charlie by the end of the day. Charlie had always been the more likeable one, the more forgivable one. People had short memories when it came to the trouble she created.
Only one of them could come home, let it be Charlie. All that Hannah had done to ensure Lacee’s survival the previous year would be repaid. She had come out of the arena to a different world. So many secrets out in the open, because Hannah had fought for her. Lacee would fight for Charlie, she would put on fake smiles and talk to cameras. Was the rest of her life just to be one camera in her face after another?
If she’d asked her sister or Christopher they’d have told her what it was like to kill. That wasn’t the information she needed. That didn’t matter. That was a hurdle to overcome. She’d figured out from years spent in the victors village that killing felt different to everybody and you could never fully anticipate what the first felt like. She’d deal with it when the time came. Lacee’s information was far more salient.
The arena. That was a threat most people forgot to calculate in. The arena and the audience and the gamemakers. It wasn’t simply enough to be the best, not always. If you lost your mind because you couldn’t take the suffocation... the isolation... well, you were as good as dead.
Lacee had simply confirmed what Charlie had feared. But fear could be conquered just as long as you acknowledged it instead of ran from it. Cowardice kills. Charlie would be no coward. Even if- Well, it was more a question of when, wasn’t it? Because she was going to do the thing she’d very carefully not been thinking about. And when Lacee said those next words ‘Make him like you,” there was no more avoiding it. Cowardice kills.
“I will,” she promised. Guiltily, a little part of her thought that it wouldn’t be hard to make the poor boy like her. The basis was already there. Just a nudge, just a little push and actually she thought she could make it so he was half-way in love with her. He’d never been subject to her and Lacee and their brand of cruelty. Even if he had, it was usually her friend they turned their ire to and not Charlie. She was always simply the loyal friend in so many people’s eyes. Dragged into whatever mischief her pseudo sister decided for the day. She’d used that to their advantage time and time again. Nobody ever thought Charlie capable of the things she was.
Yes, better to make him like her. Maybe then he’d overlook all of those too clear signs that ultimately she and her sister were more alike than anything. It needed to be a surprise it needed- Ah. There it was.
Charlie shifted her head such that her hair fell mostly over one shoulder. She smiled. It was the same one she gave people after she’d won something. The bed was soft underneath her but in her chest her heart was steady. Resolute.
The key was the audience. And she had to make the boy like to win the people watching. If she died then it would be a punishment to the entire watching capitol audience. Let them love her. Let them love her for her own merit and not for a story her sister spun. She could spin a story too.
“I don’t need to worry about weakness. I just need to make them love me.”